Had a bit of a late start to the day yesterday, then after lunch we dithered for a while before deciding that we really should go into town - J's needed to buy new work trousers for a bit, and we still had a little bit of HMV voucher left. Clothes shopping was accomplished painlessly by going to Gap, picking a pair of combats of the right size & not bothering to try them on ;) Which left only the fun things & the bribery to accomplish ;) J picked up the Four Tet album to finish off the voucher while I looked at the random selection of books HMV had on display (I get why HMV sell music bios/auto-bios, Twilight seems a little less obvious but ties in with the films I guess, but the 'auto'-biography of a Hells Angel seemed even less obvious ...). And then we went & looked in Waterstones - I started reading "Dies the Fire" by S. M. Stirling while J was looking at the Egyptian books on offer, and I may go back & buy it (I think I've got some book token left, if I can find it).

Then the bribery commenced ;) We went to Neros for coffee (well actually I had juice not coffee, I'd been rather well caffeinated already by that point), and they're still selling mince pies \o/ And then on to The Dove for a pint. After we'd ordered our first round (I had Elgoods' Black Dog Mild, J had Coach House's Burns Aulde Sleekit) we spotted there was a beer from my part of the country (Oxfordshire Ales' Detox) and a one from J's part of the country (Northumberland's Angel of the North). So obviously we had to stay for another! Detox also seemed the beer for me, as I'd overdone it a bit on Friday night ;) By the time we left it was already half seven, so we decided to pick up a takeaway at The Masha on the way home, rather than cook dinner.

Ooh, good, I guess that means it doesn't tail off in quality past the opening :) I'm sucked in by the immediate post-apocalypse side of it right now ... I shall have to have a look for that last bit of book token (which is somewhere in the Stuff to my left, I think), it seems a good thing to use it on :)

And I actually accidentally started with the third book "A Meeting in Corvallis", because Corvallis is the town I grew up in... and still went back to read all the other books. So I think they're quite good. The second trilogy isn't as strong, but still enjoyable.

Not yet, well not me at least ... despite him playing ALL DAY so far ;)

Mind you, coz he keeps skipping to the next bit of convo before the voiceover finishes I keep hearing these half bits of speech and never finding out what they're on about and that will drive me batty in the end ;)